I stumbled across a news article this morning listed in Google news. Here is a an extract from the article.

This should be an embarrassment for all parties concerned; we (by which I mean, the community of Linux users, developers and enthusiasts; I am not a developer or distributor) are still shipping on modern systems a graphics API that is now six years old, and that was superseded four years ago. I had to check Wikipedia for my chronology; GL2.1 was 2006, and 3.0 was 2008. GL4.3 is the current standard. And yet, on the shiney, new Fedora 18 install I set up a few days ago, I get GL2.1, in spite of my somewhat-recent Radeon 6650.

I just want to understand whether Linux really lags so much in terms of Graphics standards and whether it significantly impacts the graphics experience of user, especially gaming. Also, want to know it is because of lack of support from card manufacturers. I dont want to be misguided by the news article. Keen to hear your views.

For reaching OpenGL 3.2 compliance, most of what's left is OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) 1.50 support along with bits of the geometry shaders enablement. After that, OpenGL 3.3 will quickly come into place.

It's likely by the release of Mesa 9.2 (Mesa 10.0) in 5~6 months time that OpenGL 3.2 and even possibly OpenGL 3.3 will be ready finally for users of the open-source graphics drivers on the Linux desktop.

To be able to use the latest features, you always need to switch to lastest kernel, the lastest MESA software and the latest Xorg releases. Each of them are unlikely to be included in stable widespread distributions. So you usually would need to compile them from source on your own, but even then the new combination may not be able to run on your standard OS.

Regarding OpenGL, it looks like the MESA project has hard times to keep up with many new features introduced since OpenGL 3.x (until 2.x the project was only a few months behind). Also, MESA is not Linux-only: http://mesa3d.org/intro.html

eanfrid wrote:To be able to use the latest features, you always need to switch to lastest kernel, the lastest MESA software and the latest Xorg releases. Each of them are unlikely to be included in stable widespread distributions. So you usually would need to compile them from source on your own, but even then the new combination may not be able to run on your standard OS.

Regarding OpenGL, it looks like the MESA project has hard times to keep up with many new features introduced since OpenGL 3.x (until 2.x the project was only a few months behind). Also, MESA is not Linux-only: http://mesa3d.org/intro.html

Hmm. Agreed, understand that it takes time for these changes to trickle down to end user but will eventually happen and may happen sooner because of Steam OS?. I am not an avid gamer myself so wouldn't need them on my system though am interested / curious to keep myself abreast of these development as I believe progress in these fronts can help Linux gain market share. (Gaming)

By not-Linux only, you refer BSD, etc. right? Definitely, not windows, i suppose.

eanfrid wrote:To be able to use the latest features, you always need to switch to lastest kernel, the lastest MESA software and the latest Xorg releases. Each of them are unlikely to be included in stable widespread distributions. So you usually would need to compile them from source on your own, but even then the new combination may not be able to run on your standard OS.

Regarding OpenGL, it looks like the MESA project has hard times to keep up with many new features introduced since OpenGL 3.x (until 2.x the project was only a few months behind). Also, MESA is not Linux-only: http://mesa3d.org/intro.html

The Oibaf PPA is one of the easiest ways to fetch updated open-source graphics drivers for Ubuntu-based systems (it's only for the user-space drivers, but the Linux kernel can be easily fetched from the Ubuntu kernel archive). The packages offered by Oibaf are newer than what's officially available in a given Ubuntu Linux release and is usually more recent than what's found in xorg-edgers and other Launchpad PPAs.

After running a successful crowd-funding campaign, Timothy Arceri delivered on his word of implementing KHR_debug support for Mesa. The OpenGL 4.3 extension that came as a result of crowd-funding was successfully merged in Mesa and can be found with the forthcoming 10.0 release. Now the developer is back looking to implement more GL 4.3 functionality.

Timothy Arceri has launched another crowd-funding campaign, this time for a lower amount (reportedly to just cover an additional week) and to implement and mainline the GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension. The GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension is part of the OpenGL 4.3 specification and basically allows for multi-dimensional arrays to be used within OpenGL/GLSL by allowing arrays of arrays to be initialized. The GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension can be found via the registry at OpenGL.org.

Tim has already been working on the ARB_arrays_of_arrays and is looking for a paid week to work on some Piglit regression tests to work on his implementation. Most of the arrays-of-arrays work is being done within the GLSL code of Mesa and is being tested against Intel hardware, but it should be easily possible to hook up Gallium3D hardware drivers too.

For those wanting more details on the proposed GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays crowd-funding project for Mesa, check out the IndieGoGo page.